


The Sunset Job

by mediapuppy



Series: The Sunset Job [1]
Category: Henry Stickmin Series (Video Games)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder -PTSD, M/M, Post-TT Ending, Protective Henry Stickmin, Selectively Mute Henry Stickmin, The Obligatory TT Heist Fic, Triple Threat Ending | TT (Henry Stickmin), found family trope, our girl realizes she's loved and appreciated, the development ellie needs and deserves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:14:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26689504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mediapuppy/pseuds/mediapuppy
Summary: Real heists aren't nearly as glamorous as they are in the movies, especially not when your teammates are two lovesick boyfriends who can’t stop touching each other.People with glamorous Hollywood lives don’t typically go into their line of work, either.  This is where the problem starts.
Relationships: Charles Calvin & Ellie Rose & Henry Stickmin, Charles Calvin/Henry Stickmin
Series: The Sunset Job [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2072745
Comments: 63
Kudos: 240





	The Sunset Job

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I know I promised ya'll an angst fic but consider this: it made me sad, so have this instead.
> 
> This is truly just a fun trio heist fic that veered off the rails somewhere along the lines into domestic nonsense and discovering what it means to be part of a family. Ellie could punch me and I'd thank her, so lets give it up for our girl Ellie for being such a wonderful character. Warning for light drinking/some darker implications with Ellie's past but nothing's explicitly set in stone!

At age five Ellie has waist-length hair that tickles her ankles when she skips and shines strawberry blonde under a warm, cloudless sky in the clumsy beginnings of summer. 

She lives in a building with a shilled, slanted roof and a hooked chimney sloping to one side that looks like a drunk trying to get up from a great stumble. The lawn is overgrown, great big weeds reach past her knees, stretching their tiny green and brown bodies towards the heavens. 

The windows shine like grey dirty diamonds, watching her. Always watching her.

The air here smells familiar, and the wind sounds almost too tired to carry on.

This place is home.  
  


* * *

  
  


Present day Ellie lives in an apartment on base that she’s never called anything but the place she sometimes sees between missions. It came pre-furnished in the lovely shades of heat-dried dirt, seaweed green, and dusty grey, and she likes it this way just fine. There’s no framed photos or other personal touches to make the place feel indescribably sturdy and safe in a way most people view the four walls they spend most of their time.   
  
The drawers and cupboards are empty. The bags she came with lay at the foot of her bed, still full.

It’s supposed to be temporary. A momentary skip of a page in the big story of her life, because the team doesn’t click at first. There’s a few bumps in the road where they’re not sure if they’ll come out alive, or without strangling the other two. But then they survive the first mission, the second, the sixth. So they’re doing this, they guess.

“Stay,” Henry says to them in the helicopter after every mission, his voice sturdy and firm despite the wild look in his eyes. He looks them over, he always does, his eyes inspecting every drop of blood on their clothes they promise aren’t theirs. “Which one did this?” He always asks, calloused fingers lingering on bruises, cuts, his lips a tight white line across his face. It feels like the beginning of something wonderful.

They all fall into new habits, routines with each other. On the field Charles drives anything that moves and Henry takes the lead, navigating them out of impossible situations with Ellie at his side, supporting them both every step of the way. Off the field Charles teaches her how to hotwire a car, to cook a decent meal over an open campfire in the middle of nowhere. Henry teaches her to play chess, the piano, how to count cards without getting caught. 

Ellie learns their mannerisms, how they react under pressure, when they’re hurt and trying not to show it. She learns the language of their bodies when they move, when every split-second decision counts, and after months of working with them she’s confident she knows everything she has to know.

Then Henry and Charles are caught making out in a helicopter after hours and suddenly all those gentle, worried touches that had lingered on Charles just a little too long make sense. It’s rocky at first but they make it work, they always do. Henry and Charles move in together where they can be gross in peace, and Ellie happily lives a few doors down from them content with the knowledge that there’s less of a chance she’ll walk in on them now doing something indecent. Now that they can hopefully get it all out of their system before she sees them, unlike before where she was sure to knock on walls, doors, floors, anything to alert her presence before going in a room, just in case she catches them doing something she’d rather forget. 

Their missions get more involved. It’s never nearby anymore. They’re flown to places both foreign and not and afterwards Henry and Charles go to shower together while Ellie lays on the couch of their safehouse, hotel, bunker, tent, and politely pretends not to hear them. 

General Galeforce slowly learns to trust Ellie and Henry not to bolt at a moment’s notice, not to steal what they’re supposed to be saving, although the urge is always there. Ellie suspects moreso for her than Henry now that he’s got someone to come home to. And Galeforce must feel the same way, because when he gives them their newest mission he hands the stack of folders to Henry with a pointed look that says _don’t make me regret this_ , which Henry silently hands to her the moment they’re out of the tent.

“What’s on the menu this time?” Charles asks cheerily from the front seat of the helicopter, some new prototype Galeforce had finally let him use after months of begging, and he fondles the controls with a smirk as they both pile into the side seats. When Ellie shows him the papers his smile almost reaches up to the lobes of his ears. 

Their hotel is a shoddy little hole in the wall off the main roads that probably advertised charm back in the 70’s, but now has nothing to boast about but the very polite roaches that were good enough to stay off the furniture. There’s two bedrooms (thank God) and a small sitting area complete with a semi-clean kitchen Charles raids the second they get in while Ellie heads straight for the couch with the papers, Henry carrying in the bags after them.

Outside the window the air is grey with smog, a thin layer of cigarette smoke choking the clouds. Beyond that the sky is blue and the cool winds coming off the coast tussle Ellie’s hair when she opens the window. The cars scuttle down the street like shiny beetles under a bright and scorching sun, occasionally honking to each other angrily. Everything’s bordering on uncomfortably warm; their hotel room doesn’t seem to have AC, and if it does she doubts the manager downstairs will spring to turn it on anytime soon. But it could be worse. Their last mission was a covert operation where they hiked through knee-high mud under storm’s bruised and snarling sky, and afterwards camped out on a forest floor that was 80% pine needles. 

In comparison to that, Los Angeles is heaven on earth.

"It's better than the last hotel!" Charles says, throwing a pillow over a very suspicious stain on the couch before collapsing down on top of it beside her. He’s got a yogurt cup he immediately stole from the hotel’s mini fridge and quickly resumes shoveling spoonfuls into his mouth at record speed.

Ellie remembers their last hotel by a small military airport in nowhere Russia, the single room that always smelled of something thick and foul with the pull-out couch that was more springs than mattress. She'd slept on it for a grand total of three hours before Charles and Henry stumbled back from collecting intel at a bar downstairs, sweaty and breathless, forgetting she was there. She’d been forced to steal a pillow from the couch to sleep out in the living room with her back against the door just to avoid being mentally scarred. She grimaces.

"In my defense—" Charles begins the second he sees her face screw up, knowing exactly what she’s thinking. He points his spoon at her. A glob of yogurt falls into his lap.

"—please no—" Ellie groans, because no, not this again. 

"—in my defense," Charles continues anyway, like her protests mean nothing, "you didn't say anything! You were so quiet! Who just doesn’t say anything?!"

“What was I supposed to say?” Ellie replies incredulously. She’s lounged out on the couch and slaps the folder in her lap for emphasis. “‘Hey I know you’re like five inches deep in each other right now but I’d really like a glass of water and some sleep so if you’d just pull out for like three seconds—’”

“Five inches?” Charles repeats, looking about as offended as Ellie’s ever seen him. He wipes the yogurt off his pajama pants and thumbs it into his mouth without breaking eye contact.

Ellie definitely does not gag at the sight. “Oh my god, stop. Please.”

Henry, her lord and savior, gives Charles the side-eye. “Let her brief us,” he says, voice quiet and barely-there. He’s laying their bags up neatly by the door and kisses the top of Charles’ head on his way to draw the blinds over every window, like he always does. 

Ellie smiles at him thankfully as he goes, Charles pretends to be very interested in his yogurt. Ellie took a nap on the way over and now at 9pm she’s groggy and half-there. She flicks through the thick folder in her lap sticky-eyed, laying her feet down on the coffee table with a thunk.

“Well, at least Henry and I are in familiar territory,” she starts, which gets a laugh from Charles. “Um, files say we’re supposed to get something called a kokoshnik tiara, was owned by some royal family for a few decades. Tomorrow we’ll go to the party and get it from our target—”

“She’s not our target,” Henry reiterates from near the windows, peering out of them, weirdly tense.

“Sorry,” Ellie apologizes immediately, knowing how specific Henry can get about terminology sometimes. She had the good sense to never ask why, fearing the answer. “The girl we have to, you know, steal from. Our mission,” she tries, and Henry doesn’t object, so she files that away to use later.

“So apparently this was taken back in,” Ellie continues, squints down at the paper, “2012, from, uh, Ukraine it looks like, by the Toppats when they first started collecting. It was supposed to go to a museum in London but never made it.” 

“I would’ve hated to be the guy flying that cargo!” Charles laughs, scraping the last of the yogurt from the bottom of his cup. He’s been way too excited about this ever since he found out about it in the helicopter. “They always blame the pilot and— aw man, my yogurt— one sec.”

Charles tosses the empty yogurt cup into the bin beside the coffee table and heads back to the kitchen, spoon dangling out of his mouth. 

Ellie watches him go with a fond shake of her head; the absolute child. “Guess we know why it never made it at least. What we don’t know is why _she_ has it.” 

The _she_ in question is a barely legal girl whose profile makes her look like an extra from Baywatch. Her instagram is filled with a kaleidoscope of colors and too much skin, and lately has been featuring a very expensive tiara that, according to the papers Ellie thumbs through, is valued at just over fifteen million. 

She’s also posted saying that she’ll be showing it off tomorrow alongside some Hermes number at a gala in Los Angeles, which is where they come in.

“General said she was dating some Toppat member,” Charles says from across the room, head in the tiny hotel fridge, “before, you know, everything happened. I, um, think he gave it to her and didn’t really realize what it was worth.” 

“Shame.” Henry walks away from the closed windows, satisfied, and throws his arms over the back of the couch. He sounds pained at the thought of practically just giving that much money away. Ellie snorts.

“Oh well, would’ve been taken away anyway when the rocket went down,” Ellie reminds him sympathetically, because she gets it. “And, uh, Galeforce said our car’s gonna come around five tomorrow so that gives us some time to get ready and stuff. He gave us all outfits to wear for tomorrow too,” she pauses, “well, I hope _he_ didn’t because I don’t trust the fashion sense of a guy who wears camo all day, but someone did.”

“I helped pick them out!” Charles proudly declares from the kitchen. He’s got another yogurt cup out of the fridge, key lime pie flavor, and licks the excess off the top of the foil lid. 

“God help us,” Ellie deadpans, which makes Henry bend down over the back of the couch and laugh into the cushion beside her, much to Charles’ dismay. 

This is always Ellie’s favorite part: The Before. When everything’s uncertain and all they have is each other. They laugh over stupid shit to get rid of the pre-mission jitters, all cramped up in the small hotel living room the size of a mini van. Charles spends the rest of the night looking like a kicked puppy while Henry apologizes with rubbery hotdogs with cardboard buns he got from a food truck across the street. They’re both squished onto the couch together, a mess of tangled legs and shiny grease on their lips, Charles chewing open-mouthed into Henry’s ear just to watch him squirm and grimace. 

Ellie’s always felt an indescribable disconnect between herself and the world, like she was always watching in on some grand party she was never invited to, and no matter how hard she shook the knob and banged on the windows nobody ever realized she was there at all. She walks through the world like a knife through water: invincible, gliding, parting the path before her with no regard to who she pushes aside. Others had their home and she had hers: this vast, empty sea with a color so dark it has a texture like velvet, this rushing water that roars past without touching her. 

Charles and Henry are different. They are warm sand that clings to her wet feet when she breaches the surface, not letting her pass by without parts of themselves clinging on. Even when they’re together they stick to her unfailingly, even now when Henry gets up and plants a kiss on top of Charles’ head he ruffles hers on the way to the kitchen, smiling like a dream she’s never had.

It’s a feeling she doesn’t let herself indulge in too often, but she always does in The Before. The calm before the storm. She tries to memorize their faces; the way Charles’ nose crinkles when he laughs, how Henry’s smile reaches up to his eyes in a way it never did a few months ago, their warmth radiating out of them. 

In some deep part of her she knows why she always does this, the same reason why Henry draws the blinds over windows and insists on showering with Charles after every mission to make sure there’s nothing he missed. They’re both so young and they’ve never been able to hide when they’re scared, not really. They’ve just always had to be brave despite it.

But it’s a part of her she doesn’t like to examine, so she doesn’t. Ellie sinks into the cushions of the side chair and watches the two of them until they’re stretching and calling it a night, telling her that they’ll see each other in the morning, and then they’re disappearing into their bedroom too quickly, turning out the lights.

For the first time, the living room feels too big and empty.  
  


* * *

When Ellie is twelve she loves her mother very much, and sometimes her mother loves her too. 

It’s the strangest year she can remember. The floorboards creak at night with restless bodies haunting them, and the slanted drunk roof is a place she hasn’t seen in a very long time. When she has a nightmare she knows not to call out, too afraid to remind her mother and the restless bodies she’s still there.

Home is a place Ellie thinks she knows, but is beginning to think she’s not so sure.   
  


* * *

If Ellie's learned anything about their sleeping habits (she’s learned way too much, in her opinion) it's that Charles is a terrible, awful bed hog. He’s all elbows and knees when he sleeps, assaulting whoever’s unlucky enough to share a bed with him until they’re either packing up and leaving or knocked unconscious and forced to stay with him. This is something that Ellie has, unfortunately, learned from experience after she had to share a cot with him one night in a hostel in Costa Rica and found herself very much not on the bed morning come. 

So it’s not that big of a surprise when, at 2am, she hears a meaty thud of a body hitting the floor a room over and a minute later Henry shuffles into the living room with barely open eyes and a blanket tucked under his arm. He’s in nothing but a pair of boxers and a sweaty looking tank top. His hair is everywhere.

“What was that?” Ellie asks cheekily. She’s sat bright-eyed on the seat where they’d left her with the mission papers jumbled up in her lap, all marked up with her chicken scratches. She doesn’t sleep well most nights. She never has. There’s no lights on. She smiles at him like a knife from the darkness.

“Mm,” Henry rumbles back at her, stumbling his way through the kitchen without opening his eyes. He gropes around blindly in the dark until he finds the edge of the couch and flops down onto it when he finds it. The blanket stays rumpled and sad in a heap underneath him, one edge spilling out onto the floor like a tongue. 

“Not getting under the blanket?” Ellie asks, just to torture him. She sets down the papers and smiles at him with what is probably too much joy.

“No,” Henry grumbles, muffled, into the couch cushion. He’s laying face-down with his nose buried in a big stain, his arms and legs are everywhere, including one not even on the couch.

“You just gonna sleep like that?” Ellie has to ask, because as much as Henry deserves this for knowingly sharing a bed with the human starfish, he doesn’t deserve to die by couch suffocation or contracting some weird stain-related disease.

Henry shifts, turns his head so he’s not inhaling what is probably someone else’s bodily fluids soaked into the fabric. He coughs once, for good measure. “Mhmm.”

Ellie finds herself charmed by him despite so many things. Not charmed in the way Charles is charmed by him, but another sort of charmed that’s strange and personal. It was the same feelings Ellie got seeing her bed after a long mission where she wasn’t quite sure if she’d make it back. The feeling of the blankets pulled snug up to her chin and the feeling of watching Henry feel safe enough to fall asleep next to her in the dark taste the exact same.

These things are precious and few to her. It’s the little things, somebody had said to her once upon a time.

“Alrighty then. Goodnight, Henry,” Ellie says, voice barely over a mouse’s whisper, listening to Henry snore quietly in the dark.  
  


* * *

At age seventeen Ellie has lipstick smeared across her face like a bloody gash and when she looks in the mirror her hair is the same color; bright red. The color swirls around the gas station sink. She grips the edges of it, her nails bitten to the quick, watching it all go down, down. 

She stands there, hunched like a mourner, knowing that when she leaves she will be leaving this person behind: a mess of strawberry blonde, drowned down the sink.

Home is a place with a white picket-fence in movies, where the grass is always beaten down and the people smile in wide, unfamiliar ways.   
  


* * *

Ellie plans to sleep well into the morning and, failing that, she plans to walk down the street to the juice place they passed on the way up and buy herself enough of something sweet and fruity to drown in. 

She ends up doing neither, because Charles wakes her up to the smell of cooking at half past too early, and all at once she remembers why she always tries to avoid the two of them until at least noon when she can.

They’re so domestic it’s sickening most of the time, but especially when they’ve just woken up. Early in the mornings back at base Charles always cooks enough breakfast to feed an army (which he sometimes has to) while Henry saddles up next to him and helps where he’s allowed. When they have their window open Ellie can smell it from down the hall, can hear them laugh with dawn curling over their shoulders, has memorized the ways Charles talks to fill the silence that always comes with Henry.

They do it here too, this well-worn routine of theirs. Charles stands in the kitchen between their rooms with sleep flush across his cheek from where it’s been smushed into the pillow in the most awkward way possible all night. He’s standing over a black hotel pan on the burner, listening to the singsong of eggs sizzling over heat as Henry comes up behind him and slips his hand into the back pocket of Charles’ pajama pants like it’s nothing. Charles leans back against his chest, Henry’s chin on the top of his head, their bodies slipping together like two perfect puzzle pieces. 

“Good morning!” Charles chirps the second he sees Ellie glaring at them over the back of the chair she’d fallen asleep in. He’s in one of Henry’s too-big pajama shirts, scratching the back of his leg with his foot as Henry buries his prickly, unshaven face into the curve of his neck.

Ellie flops back and buries herself under a blanket thrown over her body that she didn’t remember having when she had fallen asleep a few hours ago. It’s too early for this. It’s too early for _them_.

Mainly, it’s too early for Charles. She understands Henry on a level that can only be reached through years of experience, because the skeletons in their closet are the same: the same awful, battered things full of dust and metal that they’ve shoved so deep into the corners that not even the brightest of lights will find them. They lay there and rot in the darkness, their thin fingers curling against Henry’s hands, Ellie’s ankles, guiding them to do a thousand different things that don’t make sense. 

Henry draws blinds over windows, he pulls closed the curtains with the rabid desperation of a dying man, after tough missions he breathes in frenzied, ragged gasps with his hands grabbing the sides of his head hard enough to bruise. Just once, when Charles had laid unconscious at their feet, Henry had launched himself at Charles’ assailant like a man possessed. His nose had been curled like the muzzle of a beaten dog, his lips curled back, his snarl pink gums and too much teeth. The sound that had come out of his mouth was a gunshot in the woods, making the entire world suck in a breath out of fright.

Ellie’s got her knife - this pathway through the world that she won’t let touch her anymore. She spent so many years going through the motions of life with a fatalistic apathy that it feels like a lump in the back of her throat when she thinks about it now. 

Charles is different from them - happy and loud where the world had made them cautious. A little looser, a little less world-weary. He has his own fair share of skeletons she’s sure, but he just doesn’t _get it_ like they do. He tries his best, bless his heart, but at times like this it hurts to be reminded of the fact that they’d be so much happier if she wasn’t there bothering them.

It’s hard, when the two most important people in your life love each other more than they could ever love you. 

After a few minutes of sulking under the blanket Ellie can hear footsteps headed towards her. They stop at the side of the chair, Ellie can practically feel them staring at the lump of her under the blanket.

“Do you want breakfast?” Charles asks, his voice so gentle and cautious in a way that makes her want to scream. 

“No,” Ellie says, instantly wincing at the sharp way the word comes out of her mouth. 

She can’t see Charles, but she can hear the shaky way he exhales long and slow above her. Ellie squeezes her eyes shut and wills Charles to go away and just leave her alone, because she feels awful, she feels like a child having a temper tantrum and her teammates can’t possibly understand why. If she listens closely she can hear the muted footsteps of Henry hurrying to Charles’ side, who had probably beckoned him over with a wordless glance, and they both stand there saying nothing for a long time.

Ellie doesn’t know when she falls back asleep but only that she does because when she wakes up the hotel room is quiet around her. She throws the blanket off and onto the floor and looks around to find the place empty. In front of her on the coffee table is a plate of food covered with a paper towel, a heap of scrambled eggs cooked just the way she likes them, topped with a bit of pepper and a few freshly cut tomatoes off to the side. It’s still warm. 

Suddenly the urge to cry rises in her so suddenly that for a moment she’s sure she’s going to be sick. Her throat is mysteriously thick and raw, her eyes burn as she stares at the breakfast lovingly made for her by a man she’d childishly snapped at for no reason. When her plate is wiped clean (because of course it is, Charles has always been the best cook she’d ever met) she spends the rest of the morning hovering around the living room, the kitchen, her bedroom, the door outside of the second bedroom that has the muted sounds of the television coming through it trying to think of a way to apologize. 

They all have their moments, it’s inevitable, but Ellie always feels bad when it’s her turn. She’s usually the slowest to apologize, because words are hard and she’s not used to using them in a way that matters like this, so it’s no surprise that she’s still agonizing over what to say when the time rolls around to actually start getting ready. The boys have been in their room the whole time without coming out, so she crawls back to her room, defeated, to get dressed. 

This is another thing she’s been agonizing about all day: the dress. It’s always a dress, of course it is. Ellie's never liked how she looks in dresses, but that never stops the government from assuming she’d love to play dress up as the femme fatale anyway. She's tough where she's supposed to be soft, her muscled arms filling out the sleeves and waist in a way they're not supposed to. The heels the government always gives her are too high and flashy, and she much prefers to use them as a blunt instrument to beat someone with than just an accessory to break her ankle on. 

She stands in her hotel bedroom and stares wide-eyed at the outfit she’d just unfurled from the black dressing bag hung up on the back of the door. This time, remembering that Charles had been the one to pick it out, she doesn’t fight the urge to cry when it comes.

A jumpsuit smiles back at her. It's sleeveless and tight but not form-fitting in a way that would make her toned body look strange. The color is blue, soft blue, the color of shallow tides on a warm day, and when Ellie slides it over her body and looks in the mirror she quite likes the woman looking back at her. There’s no heels, no indecent cuts to show off her breasts or the hard curve of her legs, none of the things she had complained about endlessly and was sure nobody actually cared enough to remember.

Charles remembered. She thinks back to the breakfast, to the blanket on the chair, and rushes out of the door before she’s even finished putting herself together. 

She finds him outside by the hotel roundabout with his headphones dangling from around his neck, his phone pressed up to his ear. He almost stumbles and drops it when she runs up and jumps onto his back, hugging him. 

“Oh, hey Ellie!” Charles laughs so happy and loving it hurts, like just a few hours ago she hadn’t snapped at him for reasons outside of his control. He slides the phone into his back pocket without a second thought to grab at her elbows to pull her over his back a little more, to make sure she doesn’t fall.

“Hey,” Ellie laughs back, voice a little wobbly, and Charles must hear it because he whips his head around to look at her so fast it’s a miracle his neck doesn’t snap. 

“Oh shit, hey, hey, what’s wrong?” Charles is wearing some old-fashioned suit with long coattails that tickle her legs when he leans back to set her down. When he turns around she can see that his undershirt has five buttons and only three of them are done, and all of them in the wrong holes. He looks like some bumbling butler. It fits him perfectly.

There’s always been something lost in translation between her and Charles, because Ellie acts like a wounded animal when she’s hurt out of some sort of self preservation and Charles acts like an endlessly patient dog that’ll always come back no matter how many times he’s swatted at, and these two things are so at odds with each other that Ellie had never taken the time to see just what it meant.

Ellie wipes at her eyes. “I really like the outfit you picked out.”

It feels like the wrong thing to say, because she can’t find the words in the four languages she knows that express just how truly loved she feels in this outfit, with the breakfast, and the blanket, and the thousands of things throughout the first few months that she’s just now realizing for what they are: Charles’ way of showing he loves and cares about her.

But Charles hears it, because he’s spent the past few months translating Henry’s body language and noises to words, and compared to that Ellie’s mannerisms must be a walk in the park. He claps her on the shoulder, the space within a mile radiance heating up with the sheer brilliance of his smile. “Aw man, it was no big deal. I know you don’t like dresses.”  
  


* * *

At twenty Ellie has three friends. Real friends, not the sort that say what she wants to hear just to appease her, but the sort that always has a spare room, couch, a bit of floor for her to crash on where she’s got nowhere else to go.

“Make yourself at home,” they always tell her, but when she looks back on it their smiles never quite reached up to their eyes when they looked at her. 

But then Ellie does anyway. She makes something new with them, makes them a part of this precious, intangible thing called ‘home’. They make her feel like home can be a place you create, not what you’re born into, and the youngest, most vulnerable part of herself that she tries to ignore likes the idea of that.

Strange, how much like home it feels to walk through the dark, alone, after they don’t feel the same way.  
  


* * *

The car comes for them at six. It’s an old Ford Raptor with an off-white coat and plated fenders more suited for running down barricades than taking them to a gala, but it’s what they’re given, so they make it work. They always make it work. 

Henry comes out a few minutes later for the keys in a royal blue suit that makes his legs look long and his jawline sharp against the soft cut of the fabric, and Ellie has to practically pick Charles’ jaw up from the floor so they can both squeeze into the backseats with Henry driving up front, which Charles doesn’t complain about, so she doesn’t ask. 

Charles can’t stop touching Henry the entire drive there; reaching over the front of the seat to tap at his shoulders, smooth out invisible dust just for an excuse to get close enough to kiss Henry’s cheek, to watch him blush and squirm under red lights. Ellie smiles at them despite herself, endlessly fond.

It’s a little weird, a little tense after the morning, especially with Henry whose eyes she tries not to meet in the rearview mirror. But if anyone can shake a mood like an expert it’s Charles, who leans his elbow up against the window in his stupid butler suit and smiles sloppy and wonderful. 

"Call me Duke.” Charles whips on a pair of sunglasses out of nowhere when they roll to a stop at the next red light. He looks like the happiest idiot in the world. "Duke Vanderbilt."

"What?" Ellie tries not to laugh, but then her lips are wobbling and it’s all downhill from there.

"Duke! Come on, it's my fake name!" Charles replies, looking immensely proud of himself in his stupid shades that take up more than half his face.

"Okay first of all, it's getting dark," Ellie leans over and pulls the sunglasses off his face, ignoring his little squawk of protest, "second of all, we don't need fake names."

"Fake names are good," Henry says from the front seat. Ellie can see his eyes on them through the rearview mirror, he looks stiff. He always is before a mission with them, even ones like this that he’d been doing long before he met them. Ellie tries not to shy away from his glance. "Just in case.”

Ellie resists the urge to turn away. She refuses to let anyway have that sort of power over her. "Okay, fine, but you're not being Duke Vanderbilt. I have never heard a more fake sounding name in my life."

"Vincent, then," Charles suggests brightly, a gleam of triumph. "Vincent Reeves! Top-shot lawyer, art collector—"

“Do you know anything about art?" Ellie cuts him off.

"Yes, of course I do" Charles replies slowly, pulling out his phone even slower. Definitely not to Google art facts. Of course not.

“And law?” To her surprise it’s Henry that supplies the jab, and she’s not the only one because Charles openly gapes beside her. Ellie doesn’t try to stop the full-body laugh that explodes out of her, shaking her shoulders.

"Fine then. What about Alexander the sugar baby? I would make a sugar daddy very happy you know," Charles says stiffly, just to spite Henry for his betrayal. He takes the glasses back from between Ellie’s fingers and slips them onto the neck of his undershirt, because he's pretending to be that brand of asshole tonight, apparently.

Charles comes up with a few more personas after they both shoot him down with dangerous glares: Cliff, a disgraced former surfer (“No, you can’t pretend to be someone even remotely famous. Everyone will know you’re lying”), Stone, the trust-fund son of a wealthy tycoon (“And who’s your dad then, huh? Yeah that’s what I thought”), and Reef, a wildly successful harmonica manufacturer (“Why do you think everyone in California has a name like this?”). 

It takes fifteen minutes of negotiation to finally convince Charles he can be none of these things, and then they’re turning off the main road with their location stretching high into the sky, so they just decide to wing.

The gala is in a hotel just off sunset strip bordering the line between smoggy Los Angeles and coastline Santa Monica. The building is all glass and white marble, stretching up high to the heavens with a warm golden glow coming through every window. It’s crowded outside when they get there, and they have to wait a few minutes for the cars and people to pass by the entryway roundabout before they can even get into valet. The dizzying sea of flashy dresses and drab, black suits dot the pathways leading inside. A lithe gentleman in a suit slithers his way through the crowd to greet them, and for a horrifying moment she thinks they’ve been caught, but then he’s waiting politely to open her door and take the keys.

She’s about to get out of the car when:

"What about the fake prostitute? Can I be the fake prostitute?" Charles whispers delightedly behind her.

"What?" Ellie stops halfway out of the door, does a double take. “What?”

“The fake prostitute!” Charles repeats, like that’s supposed to mean anything. He’s splayed out across the back seats waiting for her to move, a smile half the size of his face beaming up at her.

“What are you talking about?” She asks, looking away, refusing to give in to Charles’ admittedly devastating puppy eyes. There’s a few people lingering about the sidewalks who turn to look at her when she gets out of the car. They thankfully look away when they realize she’s no one they recognize or care about.

"You know, the fake prostitute! The one who gets the thing! I'll go in there and seduce it off her!” Charles explains as he scrambles out of the car after her. He’s not even whispering anymore. “But not like, actually seduce her," Charles clarifies once he sees Henry's big devastated eyes staring at him from over the top of the car. 

Ellie looks around, just to make sure nobody’s listening in on them. The valet is thankfully on Henry’s side trying to get the keys. Her voice drops down to a seething whisper. “Charles, why in the world would we need you to do that? And keep your voice down!" 

“Well someone’s gotta do it!” Charles insists a bit quieter, but not much.   
  
Henry slowly raises his hand, shuffling around the front of the car.

"Why does Henry get to be the prostitute?!" Charles tries to whisper, but it comes out more like someone yelling while being choked. A few heads turn to look at them again.

"Nobody's being the prostitute!" She's going crazy. This is crazy. "There's no prostitute!"

Henry slowly lowers his hand 

"There's always a fake prostitute! Look, Henry and I have been binging heist movies all day, we got this!" Charles scream-whispers back at her. He tries to shrug his jacket over his shoulders for emphasis but it gets stuck at his elbows, and there’s a brief struggle.

Well, at least that’s what they were doing when she was in the living room having an existential crisis. Ellie’s face screws up a little. "That, that explains so much. Oh my god. I don't care if I'm outnumbered on this one, we're not doing it." 

“No prostitutes,” Henry says suddenly, standing behind Charles with a predatory stance as he gently pulls the jacket up off Charles’ elbows and over his shoulders, as if he’s afraid someone will swoop in at any moment and steal Charles away if he’s not touching him.

“Aw, man. Okay, okay,” Charles relents immediately, leaning back against Henry’s chest, running his hand down the tough middle of Henry’s arm around him until Henry untenses. “It would’ve been a great plan though. Really authentic and everything.”

“No, it would of been awful. Let’s just, get in there, okay?” Ellie almost pleads, trying to smooth out the wrinkles in her jumpsuit from being crumpled up in the backseats next to Charles for half an hour. It’s been an exhausting day. She’s bone-tired already. “I just want to get this over with.”  
  


* * *

The first time she ever steals is at twenty-one. 

Clear pebbles of rain batter the windshield as she drives away from a home that isn’t hers, complete with a white picket fence, flamingoes guarding the front yard, and one less car in the driveway.

A song comes on the radio that she remembers. She was younger then, a soft animal of a person, singing the song in an overgrown garden with weeds up to her knees. She tries to replicate it and it isn’t quite the same. But that’s okay, right?

Ellie grips the steering wheel so tight her knuckles turn white.

The wild animal of her body goes burning into the night.  
  


* * *

They learn a few things about their mission very quickly: Her name is Cindy. Cindy wears a mean tailored dress, rolls with an even meaner crew, and her alignment is somewhere in the cross section of Fyre-fest attendee and suburban wine mom.

And she’s apparently harder to get near than the fucking president, and this is not from lack of trying. 

They’d all taken their shot at trying to get past the mob of socialites, celebutantes, and trust fund kinds that surround her at all times only to meet their admittedly devastating defeat at their perfectly manicured hands. Ellie doesn’t even get close after pretending to be a drunk college student who mistook Cindy as her best friend, Charles gets hustled by a few guys after accidentally bumping into her on the dance floor and has to be saved by Henry, who then ruins his chances by association.

And now it's ten, they've been at the party for three hours, and they've been drinking solidly for two of them. With the exception of Henry, who's driving specifically so Charles doesn't have to, she learns, which is good because Charles is three sheets to the wind before either of them can stop him.

Said man is currently on the main floor dancing like the world’s on fire with a group of people wearing suits and gowns that are worth more than she’ll see in a year, except for one guy who’s wearing a foam carrot costume. For some reason.

Charles throws his arms overhead and rocks his hips forward, letting one tail of his shirt slip out from his waistband. He’s a disaster, all smiles and sweaty skin gleaming under the honey-gold lights, the sharp angles of him alive with the music as if it’s always lived inside of him. It’s strange, because after months of knowing Charles he always still finds ways to surprise her, like when he slides across the dance floor and right next to Cindy, who laughs bright and happy at his stupid little dance moves and doesn’t push him away. 

For the first time Ellie thinks she’s starting to see what Henry sees. 

Henry chooses this moment to reappear from whatever corner he’s been lurking in for the past few hours to stand like a statue beside her. It’s the first time since the weird thing this morning that they’ve been well and truly alone, and Ellie’s not sure what to do about it. So she doesn’t do anything.

The seconds tick by.

“I’m okay,” she says eventually, an answer to a question Henry had asked just by walking up. 

Henry looks at her strangely but says nothing, which roughly translates to, _bullshit_.

She pointedly ignores the look. “He’s having fun,” she says stiffly, trying to change the subject. In front of them Charles spins around and gives the small crowd forming around him a few cheesy finger guns. They all go mad.

Henry makes a soft sound in the back of his throat Ellie’s learned to know means some sort of confirmation, but otherwise stays silent, looking meaningfully past her now to the crowd. To Charles at the center of it. She follows his eyes wordlessly.

“You’re worried about him,” Ellie says, does not ask, because if there was one constant in this world it was that Henry worries about Charles. Henry paces when Charles is out on a mission without him and stares closely at his back when Charles is making breakfast in the early morning, humming over the sizzle and crackle of sausage and eggs, the side of his hand still red from where he’d done the exact same thing last week and burnt himself. 

Henry worries about Charles even when there’s nothing wrong at all, perhaps especially then.

He nods, mouth screwing up a little when Cindy and her friends hang off Charles’ shoulders, trying to drunkenly follow his moves.

“Why? It’s not like we’re being shot at this time around,” Ellie says. The most dangerous thing she’s seen all night is the absolutely devastating jungle juice a group of sharply dressed guys made over by one of the food tables, complete with some crudely cut up oranges they stole from the trees up by the rooftop pool. The only thing they have to worry about with Charles now is the hangover he’ll have in the morning.

Hasn’t stopped Henry from hovering around the edges of her vision the entire night, looking like something that lurks in tall grass waiting for something wounded to wander past. It’s not hard to figure out that Henry doesn’t like crowds, perhaps even less than he likes the bad end of a gun, but this is an all new level of paranoia even for him, and it kind of freaks her out.

Beside her Henry chews on the inside of his cheek, grappling with the words, with the gravelly roll of his voice that comes out as certain as anything. “I love him.” 

Something in her melts a bit at that. Henry loves Charles in a thousand quiet ways that mean so much more than words could ever express, but he has a tendency to go overboard sometimes with worrying about him. After this morning she still feels a bit like a raw wound on two legs about the subject, about how Henry revolves his entire world around Charles, but she can’t help but be charmed by it still, by everything about them she wishes she had.

Her voice is soft and tender when she talks. “I know, but Henry, he’s okay—”

“Both of you,” Henry cuts her off without hesitation. He’s always been more talkative with Charles, but he makes an effort for her too, always, and it never ceases to warm her heart. “I love both of you so much, and I want you to know that. I’m watching you two.”

In his own way Henry is the most talkative out of all three of them, if you learn to speak his language. More can be said with the body than the mouth could ever hope to accomplish, and Henry has become fluent in this private language of his own creation. Once upon a time he had put his hand out towards her and said “okay, teammates” as if Ellie had ever had a choice. He always walked on the outside of the sidewalk closest to the road when they walked together, and when he spoke he meant every word. There were certain things he used to describe them when he did talk too; teammates, friends, his _family_. 

She’s always liked the weight of the words in her mouth, but she’s protective of them, refuses to say them, because saying them makes them real and vulnerable. If she refuses to acknowledge what they are then she can’t lose it. 

But maybe it’s something worth losing, if it means she gets to live in it now.

Ellie stills. It settles like a thousand tiny pinpricks underneath her skin. Her eyes feel too warm, and she has to turn away from him for a moment and blink rapidly up at the ceiling. 

“I _love_ you too,” Ellie says weakly, like it was a foreign sentence Henry had just taught her and she was trying it out for the first time. It’s a bit clumsy, the words all jumbled together awkwardly, but Henry smiles down at her anyway.

“There you go,” Henry says, and when he does she can see so much of Charles in him. She can see Charles in the way he smiles a little softer than usual, how it hooks off to one side. A real smile. An honest-to-god smile, not the ones she practiced in the mirror in the mornings.

“I just have one question for you,” Ellie says, feeling so dumb and overwhelmed, and not knowing what else to offer.

“Hm?” Henry hums.

“Does Charles sleep with his headphones on?” 

And that’s it. They don’t have to look at each other to know that they’re okay, or have some lengthy conversation about how much they mean to each other. They can just stand there with the blues of their outfits fading together, watching Charles make an absolute fool of himself out on the dancefloor with the tiara just inches away from his very sweaty hands.

Henry starts laughing, and then she’s laughing too, their arms hooked together at the elbows as they lean on each other and giggle like idiots. It takes forever for them to settle down too, shuddering sighs getting smaller and smaller like the gentle roll of a pulling tide.

Ellie wipes at her eyes, giggling despite herself when she looks back out to the crowd and sees Charles trying to do the worm but looking more like a goldfish out of water. “He’ll be okay, he’s a lot smarter than either of us give him credit for. He’s not exactly going to do something stupid.”  
  


* * *

Charles is silent for a long moment. 

“I’m allergic to strawberries,” Charles admits without looking up, chasing some olive oil on his plate with a chunk of warm bread.

The table they’d been ushered over to when the main courses for the night started being passed around is shoved into the far corner of the room away from prying eyes, which is perfect, because Cindy and her crew are seated just a table away eating something with deconstructed in the menu that tastes of pure liquid smoke. The tiara still on her head sparkles at them mockingly.

Ellie, who had just offered Charles a few strawberries from her plate, looks up at him very seriously. “...you’re allergic to strawberries?”

Charles likes strawberries. She’s sure of it. She sees him eating them all the time. He refuses to meet what is probably her very horrified face. “Only slightly.”

“Only slightly,” Ellie repeats, disbelieving.

“Like a negligible amount,” Charles replies firmly, shoving the bread into his mouth, letting the olive oil dribble down his chin defiantly.

Henry, who just last week had fed Charles chocolate-dipped strawberries on the couch during their weekly movie night in what was probably their most sickening moment to date, looks like he’s about to cry.

“It’s not like I die! I just get a little sick sometimes, like my stomach acts up,” Charles tries to explain, waving his greasy olive oil hand around for emphasis. The blush across his cheeks reaches all the way up to the tips of his ears. “I just don’t, you know, want to be stuck in the bathroom all night during a mission.”

“Oh, is that all?” Ellie scoffs, smacking Henry in the arm to bring him back down to Earth. “Henry, forget everything I said before, we’ve got to get him a leash.”

"It's like being lactose intolerant. It's just worth it!" Charles tries again, his tone miserable.

"That's not an answer! That's like the most not satisfying answer you could've given!" This is worse than the prostitute thing out by the entryway. Ellie feels like she’s losing her mind all over again.

"No, the least satisfying would've been not to answer at all," Charles argues, just to be contrary 

It takes some time but eventually Henry makes Charles promise to tell them everything that could possibly kill him or make him sick and Ellie tries her damndest not to laugh when Charles assures them this is the only thing, and they really are overreacting, he’s perfectly fine! Henry obviously doesn’t believe him but doesn’t protest when Charles shoves some more food in his mouth (that is thankfully not strawberries) and moonwalks terribly back to the dance floor for round two of trying to get the tiara, shooting them awful finger guns the whole time.  
  
Some stuff happens after that, she's not sure. One moment Charles is undoing his jacket to spin it above his head like a lasso and the next there's a shout, the sound of shattering glass, and Henry's grabbing her wrist and running before she's even figured out what's going on.

When Henry busts through the metal exit it hits the opposite wall with enough force to crack the doorknob and spills them both out into an alleyway between the hotel and the dingy brick building next door. It’s cold and dark and swollen with puddles with a rainbow sheen to them in the sliver of a glare from the streetlights. Ellie digs her heel into a crack in the concrete and tugs on Henry’s arm to stop him from running them blindly into the street.

She breathes in frenzied gasps, trying to catch her breath; frightened but strong, her terror as sharp as pain and as light as a bubble full of dangerous, flammable hydrogen. “Henry, stop!”

He does, and Ellie falters a little, unease blooming in her chest at the look on his face. 

It was the way he looked during big missions where it felt as if everything was doused with gasoline and one spark would have them all going up in flames. It was the same look he had on his face when Charles had laid unconscious at their feet, a new bruise darkening his temple. His lips are frozen in something halfway between a snarl and a smile, white and pink, his breaths sneaking out between his teeth like smoke against the dark, starless sky. His cheeks glow with a hectic color, and the white fleshy patches beneath his lower lids almost look like a second pair of eyes.

What she saw then, just as she did now, was a creature without a face. Faceless but not nameless, and it’s name was _panic_.

“Henry,” her voice seems to come from a distance, and it wobbles a bit. “Henry, hey. It’s okay.”

She can hear him breathing, raspy and trembling, echoing down the alleyway in haunted shudders. She squeezes his hand and it evens out, but only slightly. 

He stares at her, unblinking, with pinpoint pupils.

“Shh, shh, it’s okay,” she shushes him with a voice not her own, rather something softer and more tender than she ever thought could come from her. Very carefully, as if it was a raging bull on the other end of her hand and not her teammate, her friend, Ellie pats his arm until he settles down.

“Henry,” she says very seriously now, “Henry, where’s Charles?”  
  
That distressed look on his face morphs into one of horror. The cords in his neck stand up to attention.

Then they’re both dashing in opposite directions. Charles must have followed them out, he must’ve done. He always follows them. This well-oiled machine of theirs never has any loose screws or missing gears, when one of them moved it moved the rest, most times without even realizing they were moving at all. Ellie looks behind the dumpster, Henry sprints down the alleyway kicking empty bottles out of his way, then they both meet in the middle and do it all again.

Ellie’s elbow-deep in a trashcan, something she’ll laugh about hysterically back at their shitty hotel, when a voice whispers hot and heavy in her ear: “What’re we looking for?”

On instinct Ellie ducks down and makes to lunge towards the voice with her arm cocked back for a very impressive punch that never connects, because Henry’s barreling past her and scooping the owner of the voice up into his arms and spinning them around before she can suckerpunch them into next week.

“Hey!” Charles laughs, letting himself get picked up and spun around like a ragdoll. The back door, which he’d apparently ran through, slips closed with a shuttered bang behind them. 

“Charles!” Ellie whispers, unable to do anything more. Seeing him now, it’s like feeling every emotion she’s ever had in relation to him all at once, anger and happiness and overwhelming relief and, for the last few minutes at least, a fear so great it had a taste like bile in the back of her throat. She’s cried so many times in the past 24 hours that now the tears just leak out of her.

Henry’s not much better. He’s a mess, burying his face into the soft of Charles’ stomach underneath his shirt when he finally decides to stop spinning the poor thing, but he still doesn’t put Charles down. His arms are wrapped around Charles’ body like a snake, pinning Charles’ arms to his side and Charles, bless his heart, lets this happen.

Out of all three of them Charles probably has the worst observational skills, but he’s not an idiot. Ellie’s sure he can see the flushed color of their cheeks and their suspiciously wet eyes and connect the dots enough to know what he might have missed. Charles cranes his head down at an awkward angle to kiss Henry’s forehead, whisper sweet assurances into his ear, and when he does something creeps down across the side of his head in the darkness.

“Charles,” Ellie says, sputtering the word out like a tire caught in the mud. She feels like she’s going crazy all over again, because it can’t be, “is that the tiara?”

Sitting on top of his head is fifteen million dollars of metal and diamonds, and it’s half sloping off his temple like some cheap Party City Halloween crown. Charles yanks his head forward so it doesn’t topple down into a puddle that’s definitely not water. It catches the glare of the streetlight and sends white, clear pebbles dancing clumsily across the alleyway. 

Charles smiles a little nervously, as if he’s not sure he’s allowed. “Oh, yeah! I thought I’d grab it before running out here after you guys!” 

The muted sounds of the cars and people along the street fade down the alleyway, but it sounds like she’s hearing it from deep underwater. Ellie looks at the tiara on Charles’ sweaty head and sees nothing else. She has the strong urge for a drink. “How the hell were you able to get it?”

“Oh, um, I just told Cindy what was going on and she gave it to me!” Charles laughs almost shyly, smushing his cheek on top of Henry’s head, who still hasn’t let go of him, not that Charles seems to mind. “She was really nice, and she has a cat named Pudding which is awesome! She was showing me pictures, he’s so cute, wait, lemme tell you—”

Pudding is apparently a very happy cat with a single white paw and a bobbed tail who loves Fiji water with his salmon dinner every night, and his cheeks are so big it looks like a chipmunk’s. Charles puffs up his cheeks with as much air as he can handle as he describes it to them and despite everything, despite the fear and the panic almost a tangible thing oozing out of her and Henry, they both laugh, albeit a bit weakly.

Ellie pinches at the space between her eyes, both exasperated and fond. “Oh my god, why didn’t we think of that?”

The gears in her head turn, stuttering.

“Wait,” she says suddenly. “If she just gave it to you then what was that noise? There was glass, and yelling, and, and—”

"It was just two guys, you know,” Charles cuts in, tries to mime throwing something on the ground, but Henry’s still got his arms pinned to his sides, so he just flaps his fingers uselessly. “Mazel tov!” 

They’d done a lot of things in their few months together that has made her feel downright silly, but this one doesn’t feel like that. Ellie stands there and screws her mouth up a bit, grappling with this strange feeling of worry and anger and personal sheepishness like one grapples with a bar of lost soap in the bath. She felt silly alright, and she could see that same inexplicable emotion on Henry’s face as well as he, at last, put Charles down on his feet, hands hovering as the poor guy stumbles and finally finds his bearings. But it wasn’t just silliness that haunted her, but rather how a simple shattering of glass had had both of them running for the hills while Charles had stayed and completed the mission effortlessly.

Perhaps the feeling was shame, or some subset of it. It felt awful was all she knew, and she stares down at the space between her shoes with her cheeks burning.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” Charles says, a bit more somber. When Ellie looks up he’s staring right at her, then Henry, at the terrified white flesh around their eyes. “I didn’t realize I’d scared you guys.”

“No, it’s okay,” Ellie replies, tight and controlled, but with a definite undercurrent of fear still lingering about her. She hates the way it sounds.

For just a moment it looks like Charles is going to argue, but then he smiles brighter than the tiara instead. “How about we go to IHop? My treat, for freaking you guys out! We gotta celebrate completing the mission!” 

“No,” Ellie and Henry say in unison, no room for argument in their voices.

“Come on, please? I just spent like three hours dancing and I only got to eat bread, if I don’t eat something soon I’m gonna keel over and nothing else is open at this time!” Charles puffs out his bottom lip and stares up at them with big puppy dog eyes that look like something worth sinking into. 

“No, we’re not going. I’m putting my foot down,” she says, and she means it.  
  


* * *

“And can I, uh, get some hash browns? Wait, Henry, they have cupcake pancakes!” Charles bounces excitedly in his seat and shoves a brightly colored menu into Henry’s face, who’s trying very hard not to smile and losing spectacularly.

Ellie hates IHop, she decided the second they’d walked in. It’s sticky, and their waitress is a stoned teenager who spent three minutes staring into nothingness while they tried to order drinks, and now Ellie’s been sulking in her seat with a cup of room temperature water while Charles practically vibrates with giddiness across the boothe from her. Henry’s sitting beside him with the tiara placed crooked on his head, pretending to look at a menu of omelettes. 

“You’re not getting cupcake pancakes,” Ellie says for what feels like the fifth time, because the last thing they need is to be up all night with Charles as he vomits rainbows into the toilet. Not again. Not after tonight.

Charles’ cupcake pancakes arrive shockingly fast and there’s more sprinkles in the dough than seems humanly possible. Ellie and Henry watch with identical disgust as he shovels a forkful of that abomination into his mouth.

Ellie squints down at Charles’ plate, looking like she’d rather be anywhere else. “How is it?”

“Oh, it’s the worst!” Charles replies with all of the excitement of a child on Christmas morning. “Here, try it!”

It tastes even worse than she could have ever imagined, an ooze of rock-hard sprinkles and too much sugar immediately filling her mouth, but she forces a smile and a thumbs up just to get Henry to try it. He does, and manfully does not wince as he spends the next few minutes furiously chugging water as Charles laughs and pounds the table with his fist.

Once upon a time Henry had told her that the moment he met Charles he saw the rest of his life. She hadn’t understood what he had meant then, how he had described meeting Charles not as love at first sight, but rather as familiarity. _Oh, it’s him, it’s going to be him, Ellie.  
_

She remembered that conversation for a long time, dissecting it late at night, had breathed the words into her pillow like some strange, foreign prayer. 

She hadn’t gotten it. How could you meet someone and just _know_? How could you not spend months peeling apart every layer of them and then putting them back together, assuring yourself there’s nothing you’ve missed? Because you never know someone, not really, until you’ve seen them in every possible situation, and you could spend a lifetime without that ever happening. 

Looking at them it clicks. She feels a sudden surge of tenderness, a feeling so rare she feels almost displaced by it. It reminds her of the first time she’d met Charles, how he’d looked, how he’d sounded when he turned to her and said, _“Hey, I’m Charles!”_ so happy and eager to please that it had hurt her in a way she couldn’t describe. It was a genuine happiness she had sought for so long but had never truly known or seen until that very moment.

She had spent so long learning to love the sound of her feet walking away from things not meant for her that she’d forgotten how wonderful it sounded to stay. It was beautiful, despite the ebbing fear, and the absence of it overflowing with exhaustion behind her eyes, she still loved the sound of Charles laughing. She loves the sound of Henry laughing with him too, rumbly and trying despite everything.

Charles’ hash browns come with a side of strawberries and Henry switches their plates before Charles can protest. They both eat without taking their eyes off of each other, their knees knocking together, their shoulders pressed gently into the other. For so long she’d been convinced they only had eyes for each other, but then Charles is tapping her foot under the table with his shoes, and Henry reaches over the table to refill her glass, smiling something secret and soft at her.

Something deep inside of Ellie crumbles, and another thing is born.

* * *

When she is twenty-three four concrete walls are the place the guards call her home. It’s impersonal and cold, a bleak place where the smiles are all teeth and the sun hides its face behind bruised clouds too sluggish and heavy to move. The wind is constant and hard, and when it breathes between the bars of her window it sounds almost human. 

It’s the most conversation she gets until the day a man is shackled in her four concrete walls, smiling in a way that reminds Ellie of a warm, cloudless sky eighteen years ago. 

* * *

People are a collection of actions and thoughts, but Ellie had never cared much for the latter. As far as she was concerned people boiled down to what they did, the big decisions they made, an amalgamation of actions both good and bad, some invisible tally above their head with a number she could read if she stuck around long enough to see who they truly are. The why and how of the matter were just excuses for people to do awful things to each other - the natural tendency of all people, Ellie had long ago come to believe. 

Good people didn’t do bad things, and there was nobody she had ever met that didn’t do bad, and Ellie and her knife marched across time’s arrow without leaving any part of herself behind for them to hurt.

But the thing is, people speak quietly. They love quietly, too, and you love them quietly, and all around you the air is buzzing with grand gestures intangible but not unfelt. 

Henry slows down at potholes and bumps in the road so Charles can sleep peacefully up against her shoulder in the backseats of the car, and Charles drapes his jacket over the both of them without being asked to, burying his face into the curve of her neck, breathing against her skin with sickly sweet pancake breath like the inside of a piñata on a hot summer day. Henry plays something forgettable on the radio as the car rumbles quietly underneath them, marching silently through the night back to their awful little hotel, and above them the starless Los Angeles night sky is spotted with planes.

The big decisions matter still, they always will, but maybe that’s not all a person is. Maybe a person is just a collection of small, nameless moments spent smiling with those they love. Intangible moments, neither black nor white but wonderfully, deeply grey. They live in greys, are formed by them.

“I love you guys,” Ellie whispers. It’s a moment made for whispering, or at least it is inside her head. She has whole versions of herself bundled up in there, crying and angry and confused, a little girl who used to skip down the path beside her house with waist-length hair.

“We love you too,” Henry answers without hesitation. He slows to a stop at the next red light and reaches down the divider without looking, taking her hand in his. His fingers are calloused and rough from use, his palm is warm.

This is Henry, she thinks. This is Henry, unpredictable and passionate, both good and bad and not defined by either. This is Henry, a protective hand against her own in the cold, a blaze of revolution, a dying flame that never goes out completely.

This is Charles, pressed into her side. A beating heart of a person. This is Charles, knowing exactly where he begins and ends and revolting against every fiber of the world telling him to be something he’s not. This is Charles, the wood that tames the flame, warm and solid and sturdy.

This is them, home. At last.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> This was very much inspired by the time I was studying in England in the weird cold start of English summer and our dinner reservations got cancelled after a ceremony so we all went out in our gowns and suits to this McDonald's like three blocks down at 10pm and it was fantastic. I might have written this entire thing just to laugh about 3am IHOP, also because our girl Ellie deserves the world and I intend to give it to her, one awful fic at a time.
> 
> Come yell about stick figures with me on [Tumblr](https://mediapuppy.tumblr.com/) , and if ya'll have any suggestions for what I should write next come tell me! I've got an angst fic in the works I was avoiding by writing this funny thing instead, so be prepared to see that soon.


End file.
